Complexity and occlusion management for the world-in-miniature metaphor

Abstract

The World in Miniature (WIM) metaphor allows users to interact and travel efficiently in virtual environments. In addition to the first-person perspective offered by typical VR applications, the WIM offers a second dynamic viewpoint through a hand-held miniature copy of the environment. In the original WIM paper the miniature was a scaled down replica of the whole scene, thus limiting its application to simple models being manipulated at a single level of scale. Several WIM extensions have been proposed where the replica shows only a part of the environment. In this paper we present a new approach to handle complexity and occlusion in the WIM. We discuss algorithms for selecting the region of the scene which will be covered by the miniature copy and for handling occlusion from an exocentric viewpoint. We also present the results of a user-study showing that our technique can greatly improve user performance on spatial tasks in densely-occluded scenes. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.